SANDUSKY COUNTY OHIO - Graduation Oration " Clyde (Ohio) High School " 1907 *************************************************************************** OHGENWEB NOTICE: All distribution rights to this electronic data are reserved by the submitter. Reproduction or re-presentation of copyrighted material will require the permission of the copyright owner. *************************************************************************** File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by Maggie Moerdyke DitsyMM@aol.com August 7, 1998 *************************************************************************** Me again - ditsy as ever with yet another wonderful item to add - indeed this one is boring as most graduating class orations would be then as now yet the words penned are those that apply now as they did then - needless to say, we have not changed much from 1907 to 1998 and should heed the words herein - yesterday and tomorrow are very much entwined and this oration does give us thoughts of what could be had we only listened - take note, once again I have the original - enjoy and be sure to place it where ever it should be located on the website. Thank you!! Maggie Brown Moerdyke Brown-Reynolds-Hinckley-Reed-Campbell-Stone-Lennon Too many to mention yet with roots in Ohio 1835-present ---------------------- Graduation Oration " Clyde (Ohio) High School " 1907 Transcribed from original handwritten copy of Ruth Armstrong Brown, daughter of Levi Walter and Esther Converse (Stone) Brown. "Yesterday and Tomorrow" A palace is at first a vein of marble, a painting is once a canvas and pigment, a statue but a block of stone - - - - - So are our lives, built of the raw material of inheritance, ornamented and adorned by our environment. In the structure of our lives our thots (sic) and actions are the materials out of which the structure is made and yesterday is the quarry from which we draw the building stones of tomorrow. We sometimes speak of yesterday as a time that is finished, a period with which we have reckoned and left behind when in reality it comes so close on the heels of tomorrow that tomorrow must needs be on the alert to keep ahead. Yesterday is the storehouse for our sustenance tomorrow. Its granaries are filled to overflow with the choicest nuggets of wisdom and knowledge that have come down to us thru the ages. It is the efficiency of yesterday which renders the achievements of tomorrow possible. If we put yesterday into the past to be forgotten we lose the full value of its lessons and are in danger of repeating some of the fatal mistakes of the past. But if we remember past experiences to profit by them, tomorrow will be the full and final development of yesterday whether seen in the individual, in nations, or in the race at large. If yesterday’s growth was normal and rational the out growth as exhibited tomorrow will be normal and rational. Tomorrow will find us clearer in perception, stronger in achievement, nearer perfection. With the dawn of tomorrow, yesterday’s mistakes and failures will be out distanced, her weaknesses overcome, her sorrows forgotten, her hold on all that is great and good intensified. There is a sort of pathos in doing anything, however trivial it may be, for the last time. No matter how indifferently we have performed the action many times before, when we come to do it for the very last time there is always a regret that we have reached the end - - - - To the student who is about to graduate, memories of yesterday will add a great deal to the enjoyment of tomorrow. When we are busy among the whirring wheels of the work-a-day world the yesterdays of our school days will seem to us but a holiday gayety. How cheerfully would we respond to the call of the dreaded old bell and didn’t we dread it tho? Didn’t we groan when we waked with an uneasy sense of the unlearned Latin lesson that would not let us sleep late and come down leisurely to breakfast? Wasn’t it a trial to tread the familiar way to the laboratory where we must struggle with that dreadful lesson in Physics? But now, when all this agony recedes into yesterday, the memory of the pleasant routine asserts its charm and there rises up a longing to begin all over again. As we wake from these dreams of the past, we look hopefully into the future, that tomorrow, wherin (sic) lie all of life’s possibilities and the vision seems brighter on account of our pleasant memories. Yet who can tell what tomorrow may bring forth? To all of us come brilliant pictures of an ideal future and it is upon these pictures we center our hopes. We look towards a tomorrow in which capital and labor, instead of being arrayed against each other shall show some common interest. Life will not be a struggle for bare existence as is now too often the case with laboring people. The present systems where burdensome and unjust will be modified by the reasonable law of human brotherhood. To every man will be given the right to live and to work with just compensation for life well lived and work well done. From the forefathers of yesterday will have sprung the physical and intellectual giants of tomorrow, and each succeeding tomorrow will show what centuries of culture and refinement have done for the human race. Relations between countries will be more friendly and wars will cease. No man may prophesy with certainty what the future will be but all may hope that there is a good time coming when the few shall not live in luxury while the many suffer for the bare necessities of life. When children shall no longer be held in the bondage of wage slavery but shall play, study, and grow, as God meant them to do, into useful men and women, a benefit not a burden to the community in which they live. When the poor shall not be fed from the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table. Instead the rich and poor shall stand on the same level. The poor man may enjoy the intellectual feast of the rich in colleges built for him. The rich may know the pleasure of money honestly and there shall be mutual service with liberty and justice for all. Each is building his world from within; thought is the builder; for thots (sic) are forces and according as used do they bring success or failure - - - - From the thots (sic) of yesterday is built the living temple of tomorrow.